


Legacy, from the Memoirs of Henry Gordon

by Crocmon



Series: Memoirs of Henry Gordon, Savior of the Star [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Crossover, Drama, Gen, Memoirs, Tragedy/Comedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28434792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crocmon/pseuds/Crocmon
Summary: (CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR 5.4+)A particular tale, tucked away deep in a personal library, was dictated by the late Warrior of Light, Henry Gordon. Deeply classified, it is the first-hand account of the Warrior of Light's diving into the ruins known only as "The River Styx Facility" to save his missing daughter, Maralla "Voidscale" Gordon, from whatever she sought to find within. This takes place years after the adventures that earned him a place in Eorzean history, when the Hero of Eorzea was well into his forties, and his daughter was approaching her twenties. What horrors are tucked away within the ancient Allagan facility that Maralla is so dead-set on finding? And why was it set aside in particular for one friend to find? And what gave the dreaded "Voidscale" the idea to pursue this facility in the first place?
Series: Memoirs of Henry Gordon, Savior of the Star [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915624
Kudos: 2





	1. Namedays on the Steppe

> _Out of concern for… Interested parties trying to pursue the footsteps of Henry Gordon and his daughter, Maralla, this particular excerpt from the Archives has been tucked away, deep within the recesses of his own private (and poorly organized) library. Were it not for this measure, and the sheer luck that the heirs to his estate agree that some secrets should remain buried, I firmly believe that you would not be the only one seeking some degree of closure of what came. Your reading this now speaks either to the eventual declassification of such a document (and a time where the Scions of the Seventh Dawn had fully cleansed the Allagan Ruins of the Burn of hostiles), or your age finally getting the better of you, old friend._
> 
> _G’raha Tia, this excerpt contains special interest to you, and pretending I am writing to anyone else with these footnotes will be a disservice to us both. Your interest stems in no small part from a particular discovery made deep within this facility, one that not only holds a clue to your lineage but once contained the information needed to utterly annihilate at least four different theories on Allagan history. Things that, as I am sure you will reluctantly agree, are better off left to conjecture. Even with sensitive matters as these, Henry Gordon’s account is… Lacking when it is not entirely focused on his stream of consciousness. Where appropriate, I will provide context in the margins. Anywhere else, I will draw on the accounts of his subordinates. At the time, he was on loan to the Maelstrom, but this was a strictly classified operation. One that he discussed behind the most securely closed doors with a select few, myself included._
> 
> _Old friend, if I could have told you before he passed, I would have. I am sure he would have loved to regale you with this tale. But, some things I believe he felt would be best left for you to discover alone, in private._
> 
> _Twelve guide you._
> 
>   * __Lynell Martin, Immortal Flames Ambassador and former Ishgardian Inquisitor__
> 
> * * *
> 
> 


My exploits have become known the world over, at least once now, and despite my constant debating the merits of such recognition (surely there were those with less fantastical origins as myself doing far more impressive things than I!), I confess that I rest well because of such deeds described in bardic tales.

Not all of them, however, will be heard in any bard’s tale. Some of them are likely silenced, and I want them penned purely because there will come a time where such things will be needed by those who come after you and I. Or, considering your youth, perhaps only myself. My daughter reluctantly agreed to keep this out of her own boasts, and I pray that you keep this silent. I was in my forties, approaching ‘middle age’ by the standards of my old home, and ‘old as dirt’ by the standards of Eorzea’s fairly brutal life. But, with a knocking at my door in Ishgard I began one particular adventure I hope is never brought to a particular friend’s ears.

I received a missive from a Dotharl messenger, who personally came running to me and nearly dropped dead before delivering it. Trouble on the homefront, he warned me of. After nursing him to health (and making sure his marathon run did not end in a heart attack), he finally gasped in enough oxygen to tell me straight.

“Khagan,” he gasped, “Sadu, she-” He almost passed out once more.

I will tell you nothing else incensed me more than hearing his stutter, the gasp of being unable to tell me something that had such importance it nearly killed him to deliver it. Of course, I responded with due grace and courtesy by grabbing his shoulders and shaking him from his fatigue as if he were a worn out magitek photocell.

“Sadu will see you at once, she wishes me to say nothing more, please!” the man responded, and it was to my chagrin that I could not respond by yelling obscenities at him and sending him back to her with those words in his mind. The mad Xaela woman who gave me a daughter would have personally traveled to tell me this herself, as well as bludgeon me to death with a table leg, had I ‘shot the messenger’ in such a way as I wished. Nonetheless, I packed my things before reviewing the man’s plight. The messenger’s words felt… Not quite hollow, but as if he knew there was more to the scenario. I would have pressed for more information, but he and I both feared the wrath of Sadu equally. He would fear her reaction to speaking for her almost as much as I would have feared her showing up on my doorstep with _another_ child.

> _The firstborn child of Henry Gordon was its own affair, one that led to several bells of combat before Maralla was named as she was. When questioned, Sadu Dotharl insisted she let the babe have Henry’s last name as a concession that, even though she claimed victory, he was too shocked by the revelation he had given her a child to fight at his full effectiveness. His wife, who gave him two lovely children, also reports that he was filled with terror the day he was told he was to be a legitimate father, as opposed to an illegitimate one as with Maralla._

So, I think you will not fault me for telling my Adventurer Squadron (at the time with the Maelstrom, as part of a two-moon rotation), that I would call them if I needed them. They were to stay at the Doman Enclave, and handle light volunteer work while I saw to a ‘family matter.’ They knew of Maralla by this point, most of them seeing her as a niece that they were terrified of, and so figured I would be undoing another nasty mess of political fallout from her near-murder of a prominent Oronir suitor.

> _Few can be blamed for fearing “Voidscale,” who took to the art of Red Mage with staggering power and efficiency._

After some travel on my Chocobo, Hank, I found myself at the yurt of Sadu Dotharl. Observing the requisite customs, I made my way inside and sat across from her. She aged like fine wine, and it was a tragedy I was at the time married with two children, for I may very well have asked if a second Maralla was in order. You may think less of me, but know that I’m a Hyur with a pulse first and foremost. As well, my marriage combined with the fact that she already bore the look of someone worried out of their mind convinced me to stay my tongue. At the sight of her brow crinkled in true concern, my sword-arm tensed. When she made no declaration of intent to duel me, I began to suspect this was frankly the concern of a worried mother. An emotion I never took her to have, before that day.

“Sadu Dotharl, mother of my firstborn,” I opened, to which she shot me a look that chilled me to the bone.

“Discard your pleasantries, Khagan, your heiress has vanished.”

“Vanished?” I gasped, as my blood ran cold.

“She had a ‘hunch,’ and took three able-bodied men with her to pursue it. Said it would be a discovery that would thrust the Steppe into the future.”

“A hunch?” I asked, uneasiness filling the room as my arm tensed so hard I thought it would dislocate at the shoulder, “Did she explain it any further?”

“I heard it from her through the linkpearl. I screamed at her to come home,” She paused expecting me to make a quip about how much she cared, but in matters of my flesh and blood I cared little for jest.

> _This is one of the few circumstances in which Henry does not do something comical, and lines up with his treatment of both children he had after Maralla. If ever they were in danger, he would assume a relatively no-nonsense demeanor._

“As would I have, such a discovery is just as likely to kill her as it is to give her glory,” I finally said, to break the silence.

“You would not believe her talking of it, from her vicious nature, but she would be perfectly content to die so that someone after her could follow her steps and propel the world further. She takes that from you.”

“Flirtation aside,” I waved a hand to dismiss the whole line of conversation, “How long has she been gone?”

> _A point of contention between himself and his wife was that Sadu would often make overt advances on him in front of her. As you can imagine, before the two were wed some of these advances were reciprocated. Sadu was content to leave it as mischief, nothing more._

“I let her have two days, which is her usual time for calming her inner flames and coming to her senses. This is the third.”

“That messenger came awfully quick, then,” I noted, and in hindsight I should have bit my tongue.

“She ran off while he was away!” Sadu hissed, scowling, and a predatory glare filled her eyes as she almost stood up, leaning on the table. Reader, I know when a woman is likely to rip my throat out, and at my age I’ve seen that expression enough times to know when it’s _going_ to happen if I don’t stop myself while I’m ahead. I suggest you ask a woman you’re afraid of something stupid and offensive, and have her give you that look. Commit it to memory.

> _He fails to understand that his Echo gives him insight others don’t. Every woman makes the face a little differently, and I hope you certainly understand that better than he did. If he did not have his Echo, I imagine the man would not have reproduced at all, much less three times. Twelve know it was basically a how-to guide to navigating relationships, and he still managed to fumble them._

“Fine, fine! Things changed. So I take it he was sent to get me, for what, if not for her disappearance?” I asked, submissively holding up both my palms. This eased her back into her chair, and I sighed in relief, lowering my hands and folding them in my lap.

“It was to be a celebration of her nameday.”

“And she ran away from that? Nameday celebrations aren’t _that_ bad,”

“We intended to see if you approved of any suitors.”

“Was she afraid I would saddle her with one? You and I both know I’m way too independently-minded to suggest someone else get saddled before they’re ready to be.”

“I may have convinced her you would,” Sadu smirked, “Such is the only way to really get her in line some days and, while her reaction _was_ comical, her pursuit of the ruins in the Burn-”

“The _Burn!?_ Of all places?!” My outburst was met with her smirk turning into a glare. She continued after clearing her throat.

“The Burn. Where else are ancient ruins of Allag in easy flying distance? Now, to resume, her pursuit has left me some cause for concern. Namely in how long she’s been gone.”

“The Burn will dry her aether reserves out faster than she can naturally replenish them, especially if she’s attacked by the beasts out there! You just let her go?” Sadu gave me a flat look, a sigh left through her nose, and I rolled my eyes at myself before holding a hand up and shrugging that arm, “I forget who raised her while I was forced to save the world from... “

“You put it in so wonderful a way, Khagan. Your words before were ‘conceivably anything,’ and next time you were asked to leave your precious daughter with me you said… What were those words again?” She gave me an evil smile.

“I would trust you and X’ruhn Tia to care for her, and I’ll care for you.”

“I can only hope you didn’t use all of your charm on _me,_ or your wife will have had a very disappointing time with making your other two children,” She laughed, and after suffering a final joke from her about the night I unwittingly helped her conceive Maralla, I made my way with haste out of the camp. But not without contacting my squadron.


	2. CLASSIFIED EYES ONLY - Account of "River Styx" Incident, Kumokiri

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry Gordon’s account skips quite a bit of information on the assumption that you have read his entire memoir in one sitting and somehow remembered the paragraph or two he wrote about the Burn, which if I am not mistaken is information you certainly require, G’raha (or, to pretend it is not he that reads this and he alone, Reader), so I will take the liberty to interweave a small first-hand account from Kumokiri, an Au Ra from the Far East who had the pleasure of serving in Henry Gordon’s company intermittently.
> 
> \- Lynell Martin, Immortal Flames Ambassador and former Ishgardian Inquisitor

“When the Warrior of Light calls upon your help for a mission, you take it.” Those were the words I lived for, then, and I was proud to have been trusted with so discrete a matter. The fact that I am recording it now in a journal and likely submitting it to our superiors in the Grand Companies as a sort of testimony is rather ironic, then, considering how little he wanted us to talk about it.

When we ventured toward the Burn, I felt the aether sloughing off me like a fine film, and it was only when we stepped food into the area properly that I fully understood what we’d found ourselves in. It was blindingly bright, with what felt as sand crunching ‘neath our feet. I was thankful for the gear I had been issued by Henry (he insisted we call him that, rather than the default of rank/name, especially after we’d served with him for so long), that I didn’t sink through to whatever unfathomable depths the sands concealed.

I was advised by Henry, Hastaloeya, Toragana, and Nanasomi, to mind my step and to watch the expenditure of aether. The way Henry explained it, the Burn was something of a negative space. In an effort to “balance it out,” the Burn treated a being’s aether with something of an anticoagulant: your body would not be able to close off an opening made for a spell nearly as easily, so one would need to exert their magic at half strength, and the Burn would coax the rest of it out of you.

He had worry on his face, a massive sword on his back, and if I had not known better I would say he considered Maralla the little girl he had shown us years prior and would have traversed the Void to crank the neck of whatever Voidsent tried to take her from him. I’ll never forget when he refused to let Nanasomi state that she may have died. Hastaloeya threatened to pitch him over a hill, and Henry did not correct the burly Roegadyn for the remark. Instead, Henry’s jaw was set and his posture leaning forward. Footfall after footfall, it was as if he were navigating something he had seen before.

After what felt like bells in silence, Henry grabbed at his forehead and dropped to one knee. We thought he had twisted his ankle, or caught the reflection of the sun on the sands badly enough to blind himself, but he quickly stood up, shaking his head. He scoured the wastes, finding a strange point, and charging forward. He found a campsite, and within the bell managed to follow traces (and several instances of taking a knee) to a massive ruin. It seemed to shimmer and reveal itself before us, which terrified me but I could not read a reaction in Henry’s face.

“This is the place,” He said with a surety in his voice I am hard-pressed to find in anyone lesser than he. He looked at an utterly featureless Allagan wall, flat and bearing only the strange arcane geometries present in all Allagan architecture, “Follow my steps exactly.”

He gestured to a slight depression in the sands, and I recognized the remains of a packbeast.

“What caused it to die?” I asked, meekly.

“Maralla knew of this place, and had lost a packbeast to it. She brought a few extras with her,” he spoke, no doubt drawing this from his Echo’s visions.

> _One would have suspected she did not know it existed at all, but truthfully she just had no idea the instances of him taking a knee were his Echo granting him the visions. Had he mentioned something (which in his age he simply could not care to), she may have connected the dots._

“And she tested the trail with it?”

“Aye. She’d send them along, using them to test the measures of the defense mechanism. If you don’t follow my steps to the toe placement, we may very well not make it home.”

“How did she know this was here, in the first place?”

“I’ve my suspicions,” he said, trailing off into something of an inner monologue. Not knowing then what I do now, I had no idea how to respond, and so I simply followed his lead. He was confident, each step following a precise placement. Then, when we were at what appeared to be a yawning entrance, he looked us over, clapped his hands, and went to rest his hand on the wall. Upon his hand touching the wall, he began to quake wildly, chattering his jaw and shaking as if electrocuted. This went on for several seconds, all of us convinced we would see him vaporize before us, before he fell on his rear and laughed.

“Sir!” Hastaloeya shouted, despite himself, and his face switched around at random between shock, humor, and annoyance.

“Ha! You should have seen the looks on your faces! Relax, we made it past the defense grid. Now the real test begins. Toragana, how good is your lockpicking skill?”

“Not great, sir, I-”

“Don’t downplay yourself, I’ve seen you expertly pop open the Squadron Armoire at least twice.”

> _Ironic as always that chastises his subordinates for downplaying themselves._

He nodded, “You will need to go downstairs. Nanasomi, Hastaloeya, stay in the first room. Kumokiri and myself will be in the second.”

“Sir?” We asked in unison.

“You’re right,” He nodded, “I’ll go downstairs.”

Attached is a diagram detailing what exactly we did to blow the doors open, after that exchange. How Henry Gordon came to understand this is beyond me, but I chalked it up to his Echo explaining this in no uncertain detail. However, I’ll never forget the voice that echoed throughout the facility. If it unnerved him, I never saw it. But, in Eorzean Basic, all of us heard the facility speak to him, and deploy a small Allagan Accompaniment Node to face him.

_“Styx Facility Security Measures Compromised. Initiating Emergency Backup Systems. Unidentified humanoid lifeforms approaching Charon’s Crossing. Unsundered Lifeforms detected.”_

Henry stiffened at the Node as it scanned his body with a razor-thin beam of light that illuminated the outline of something _else_ around him. I believe this was something of an aetheric signature? He did not have time to explain, nor did we have time to ask him.


	3. Welcome Home, Azem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Making up for the gap in coverage with Kumokiri's report, I believe Henry Gordon's account now can resume apace. It would appear, since it is not explicitly stated when it is relevant (as Henry's memoirs constantly ramble and meander away from the point), that the facility recognized the Sun Stone that he references with frustratingly little explanation. From there, it identified him as a member of the Convocation, one of the original beings that we now know as Ascian.

_“Azem,”_ the facility said aloud, _“Welcome home, it has been too long.”_

Those words, my friend, chilled me to the bone. They still do. Never before had something just blurted out my secret identity like that, most people in my storied past had the decency to leave it ambiguous, thus that nobody outside of those who knew would even have the suspicion that something was up. But, there it was, outing me like I had always intended those around me to know the dreaded secret, that I was more than some idiot from New Jersey who lucked his way into martial prowess. That I was anything more than they were at the start.

Though, in hindsight, perhaps that announcement booming through the facility echoed to the ears of my daughter. Though created from mortal means mixed with magical, she was still just that: mortally created. A deity did not conjure her from another world, charge her full of some Godforsaken power, and say “go forth, my little winnower, trim the fat!” the way Hydaelyn did me. She had a gift for Red Magic, an uncanny knack for balancing the two forms out and detonating them with the force only she could muster, but that was not contending with gods. Er, I’m sorry, “primals.” Demigods, more accurate to the word, but _minor deities all the same._ She could be tempered! While there was a cure in the works, it was not something I could just clap my hands and do for her. I wanted nothing more than to be sure she was safe, and at the time I had every inclination to believe that this blasted hole in the Burn wanted her dead.

_“Threat determined: Styx compromised. Aetheric Purge Protocol recommended.”_

The facility itself did little to help me, and I considered hefting my zweihander through the node’s shell and tear the facility apart, piece by piece, until I had torn her from its clutches and scolded her thoroughly for using such a deadly endeavor to escape a blasted nameday celebration! Her wanting to die rather than be _offered_ suitors I would more than happily tell to kick rocks drove me mad with rage, which is just as well that I went with the Dark Knight’s Soul Crystal in hand. The Node began spitting out facts, figures, and a tourist guide’s account of all the wonderful things at work in the “River Styx” facility, and how it was the pinnacle of Allagan technology. I grew sick of the clean, sterilized blue lights and annoyingly well-intentioned mechanisms around us as we found an elevator jammed with the dust from the Burn, thousands of tonze of burnt aethersand having blown in over eons of wastefulness combined with the cataclysm that drained the land of its aetheric content.

As we rounded a corner, I was stopped on a dime and was almost bowled over by my subordinates. Hastaloeya, ironically for how large he was, sidestepped me and his jaw dropped. Kumokiri gasped, and I heard her teeth chatter. Floating in the center of this massive, circular room, was _Hades._ Or, to be less dramatic, a bloody statue of Emet-Selch’s true form, when he would call upon the collective might of the Lost.

A form I thought I would never see again, much less have explained to me by the blasted facility I found myself in.

_“Charon’s Crossing breached. A single unregistered Draconic life form and four humanoids of unknown origin detected in Styx laboratory. Status: Disastrous. Please vacate the premises. This will be your only warning.”_

“Sir,” Nanasomi asked, drawing my attention to him with what must have been an intimidating glower, “What… Is that?” He nervously pointed at the statue, and we approached it following a walkway. Despite the tonze and tonze of sand that had trickled into this place like an hourglass, an unsettling void was created around the statue of Hades.

“Alright,” Toragana said aloud, “Whichever of you is whispering and trying to unsettle me, _stop_. I’ve got a quiver full of arrows I’ll put in your arse if you don’t,” She stammered more insistent remarks, but I realized that there was a whisper at the same time my subordinates did. I gulped, and held a hand in assurance.

“No, that’s-” I shuddered to think further on it.

“That would be the statue,” Kumokiri shuddered, “It positively chills the room, and smells of death.”

> _ In her own report, Kumokiri would go at great length to explain how she knew what that smelled like, and how she regretted using those words. There was a particular stabbing sensation she states in her own reports that ‘the smell of death’ does not include. She and the rest of the squad with Henry Gordon on this fateful expedition would go at great lengths to explain that, on top of smelling like death, it also forced upon their sight, taste, hearing, and vision, things associated with death. _

I shudder to consider it now, but such a place was given dark power. How Dark aether was used to create life was beyond me, but what I noticed from the statue was that it was not one at all. What we saw was a simulacra of Hades, splayed out, and exerting itself on the surroundings in such a way that it willed everything around it to stay away. A perfect sphere was pushed around it, and I noticed it was spherical when I followed the flow of sand. It was as if a glass ball was resting on the ground before all of the sand poured in at once, and perhaps that was what really created the Burn, rather than the consecutive summoning of Primals?

Of course, my wondering this would cause me to have another realization, that I would foolishly state aloud.

“That-” I stammered, _“That is a primal.”_

Its power was unfathomable, far greater than that of most primals I had dealt with in my time. The Sun Stone whispered into my mind that it was clearly a Concept, much like the entities I saw and fought in Amaurot’s Akadaemia Anyder. I reached my hand to my neck, rubbing the Sun Stone so that it would whisper more information to me, and summon the stupid Node instead with a hint of mischief.

_“This is Charon’s Crossing. What you see before you, Azem, is not Hades at all! As impressive the simulacra may be, this is in fact a small Concept of him, a Concept built to handle the task of transferring consciousnesses from dying bodies into freshly cloned ones. This technique was studied, simulated, and enhanced by generations of Allagan scholars until it could be automated through the use of aetherochemical constructs. It was left here as a way to remind Allag where they came from, a fixture that would keep them humble as they ventured into eternity.”_

“Sir this is _wrong,_ ” Hastaloeya whispered to me. I had a mind to agree.

“Node,” I spoke curtly, trying to stop Hastaloeya from disturbing the group any more than they were, “How would we deactivate this facility?”

_“The River Styx Facility can only be shut down by a member of the Convocation. Azem, while you may have once been, you no longer have the authority to-”_

“I did not ask for permission. I asked how to shut it down.”

_“Processing. Your request has been sent to the Apex Intellect for review, an exception may be made, but typical wait time is in: Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Nine. Years.”_

The Node was silent for some time, before I finally grew sick of looking at the blasted Primal before us.

“Node, how would I disable this Concept?”

_“Aetheric Purge Protocol would be the fastest way to disable this Concept. It is, in fact, the recommended course of action for the current Situation. ALERT! Unidentified lifeforms detected in Styx Laboratory. Please evacuate the facility immediately, this will-”_

“Enough, dammit,” I shouted, giving the egg-shaped node a slap, “That’s what we’re going to do. Lead us to the intruders, so that we may escort them into custody.”

Following the silent orb, we approached what looked to be some sort of control room, and I saw on the other side of some accursed glass my daughter.

“Maralla!” I shouted, possessed by something that was not _entirely_ my own volition. The Soul Crystal told me I should send my fist through the glass, and as I scanned the rest of the room before us, I understood why such a fervor had overtaken me.

_A bloody dragon._

The beast stood on its hind legs, clutching Maralla in its front claws, and if it hadn’t made a point to try coating the glass in spittle I may have never noticed a key feature about it: it was equal parts flesh as it was machine. A strange cloud filled it, and I hardly focused on what appeared to be insects in the cloud before I looked and saw something horrifying in a casket behind the towering abomination.

_Clones._

Columns of what appeared to be Hyurs in tubes. All of them were utterly featureless, with floating screens showing various creatures with lines pointing to segments of the human bodies. Each body was ready to be pumped with _something_ and made into a proper person. Hastaloeya gulped loud enough for me to hear, and Nanasomi declared how unfair it was that he couldn’t see a single Lalafell in the tubes.

“Be happy there isn’t one, the implications aren’t good for those of us who could have kin in there,” I barked, knowing full-well what this was. Each one of those held the potential to carry everything that would make up any one of us, like a glass that one could pour a drink into. What made me uncomfortable was the fact that this had been here, in the Burn, right under the noses of Othard’s people for a measure of time I had no scale for.

“Father!” Maralla shouted, though her voice was muffled in the glass, “Why did you come here?!”

“I came here to get you out, you loudmouthed-”

> _They clearly held such a loving, wholesome relationship. Henry Gordon would often go at great lengths to explain that, despite bitterly arguing, he loved his child deeply. In my time with her, she would do everything she could to stop herself from admitting the same. Their exchanges were terse, often misinterpreted by bystanders as rude, but it came from a place of love. Well, as warm a place of love as a child raised almost exclusively by Sadu Dotharl is capable of._

The drake roared again, slamming its fist into the glass. It gave me a string of Draconic obscenities, somehow recognized who I was, and howled that I would regret the murder of Nidhogg. That my death would be tit-for-tat to the death of its sire, and that Maralla and her allies would be icing on the proverbial cake. Or, well, whatever the draconic equivalent of cake was, I’m simplifying the whole speech quite a bit here because I was far from caring about the intricacies of a deranged Allagan abomination’s thoughts of me. I cared even less of how it managed to survive the Dragonsong War, chase this facility down, and luck out to abduct my daughter.

As the monster rambled on, it threw a claw back to a pod. My eyes drifted to the pod, and I watched in utter horror as, in a spray of clear liquid and the dislodging of tubes, the towering form of Emperor Xande fell to the platform below. The being staggered, barking in unholy language that I shan’t repeat here, before it locked eyes with me and slammed into the glass with one of its fists. The Emperor of a long-dead civilization simply glowered at us with its face seemingly carved from obsidian. The dragon howled at it, bowing, and the monstrosity drew its staff, pointed it straight up, and created a portal to Twelve-know-where before stealing my daughter and vanishing into it.

I was filled with utter dread, knowing the being that would have stolen the Void and used it as a personal army now held my daughter hostage. This was on top of still not having identified the fellows she came with, though my mind recognized that they may have been slain long ago by this facility’s defenses. Perhaps, even, the reason she got this far. I do not believe Maralla would have used them that way with malice, by the contrary, she cared for those at her back with a sincerity I never suspected. She later would confirm that she offered herself to spare them, but that was not in my mind at the time nor was it something I had any evidence to work with. With Xande on the field, there was nothing I could worry about beyond that. He somehow also recognized me, which meant this was the same Xande that I slew at the Crystal Tower so many years ago. The very same one that wanted nothing more than me and my band of adventurers dead.

“Sir?” Toragana asked, “Is that-”

“A clone of Emperor Xande? Yes. A match for us? No.”

“How did one of those get _here?_ I thought you killed the only remaining one??”

“This is an ancient Allagan facility that enslaved a Primal to help them clone more effectively. If we ask how it got here, we’ll go mad. We can either go mad now, or after a few drinks at the Enclave tonight. Your call.”

Needless to say, the vote was unanimous.


	4. Wonders of Allag, Honestly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As ever, Henry Gordon's account of things seems to breeze through things that otherwise might have borne some better descriptions. As with the copy of Kumokiri's report that was attached, you will find a suitable set of diagrams explaining the various things done in order to not only maneuver through the facility (which he may not have realized it at the time, but had an "elevator tube" that launched the occupants from the Source through the Aetherial Sea to another part of the facility. Of course, he'd never have the wherewithal to grasp that while fighting monsters at full-speed, but the facility itself is truly remarkable.
> 
> An utter tragedy it could not be used for good.

_“Why won’t it stop replicating itself?!”_ I shouted, cleaving one of the foul dragons in two and exerting my Echo to dispel the blasted swarm of insects or whatever they were from my form. I had been dispelling swarms of the bugs from my fellows, and we found aetherochemical “exhaust ports” to sling particularly nasty clusters of bugs into, which my Echo told me was probably the smartest call.

Why my Echo was telling me how to fight a blasted half-machine, half-dragon is a question for a whole other day, a day I never hope to have time for. We found ourselves staring down the final replicated dragon, and it screamed bloody murder as it charged some kind of foul aether blast. If I cared enough to recognize it, I would have called it Ultima Fire or something, but all I knew was if we didn’t kill it, it would have exterminated the entire lot of us. And so we had chased it and its many replications through a portal that shot us through the Aetherial Sea into another leg of the facility, where we were fighting dozens of draconic and mechanical beings Hellbent on eviscerating us where we stood. This final one, however, seemed to rip the Aetherial Sea in through the chutes we had not yet stuffed with its swarms of insect-like machines, and its body began to glow with raw destructive potency.

“Hastaloeya! With me!” The Roegadyn charged with me, and we brought our massive blades down on the beast’s limbs. Swinging like madmen, we ripped its mechanical bits out and brought it to our height as if it had been a particularly ugly birch tree. Toragana hailed arrows into it, Nanasomi did the same, and ultimately Kumokiri blasted it with a surge of Conjury that startled even herself as the aether in the air was particularly thick and pliable for her to use in spells. The dragon’s insects began to dissipate around us, swarms plummeting from the air, and we watched as the ugly thing finally dropped into several ponze of dust before us. It cursed me with its dying breath, and I hefted my sword through its crumbling skull with a roar of parental fury.

“And that’s for giving my daughter to a Light-infused abomination,” I shouted, before stringing in a mess of disgusting words. Looking at my subordinates, I had to have said something offensive.

> _He said something along the lines of “and if I knew you’d try to [euphemism for unpleasant sexual contact] in the [buttocks] like this I’d have castrated you with a toothbrush you draconic [best left untranslated].” It is best left to the imagination._

_“Multiple hostile intruders detected in Styx Laboratory. Unidentified lifeform detected approaching Styx Control. Confinement Protocol Initiated. Warning: aetherochemical pathways obstructed. You have no warnings left. Aetherial Damming Protocol Initiated.”_

Needless to say my subordinates asked me what all of that meant, and I thumbed my Sun stone to ask. It gave me flashes of panic, alarm, and ultimately an image of a very painful death, with imagery of Dalamud falling sprinkled in for what I can only assume was Azem’s attempt at dramatic effect. I tapped my finger to my chin in thought.

“The fields that draw a line between Garlemald and Othard through the Burn have just been arranged to seal us into this facility. Those portals we used to get here shut behind us, as well. If I remember my cosmology correctly, the Aetherial Sea being _dammed_ is a bad thing.” I rolled my shoulders, and tried to orient myself towards a way deeper into the facility.

“Why would anyone damn the Aether Sea? Isn’t that what the Star floats in? What good’s it gonna do by cursing at it?” Nanasomi asked, scratching at his head. Hastaloeya pointed at him, nodding intently as if to echo the question.

I want you to know that what my subordinates thought was a steely resolve was in fact me completely dissociating from the idea that such a mixup as “damn” and “dam” was happening. The Sun stone gave me images of laughter. As did my Soul Crystal. I could not act on either of these urges, for I felt they were hardly joking.

> _In their reports, Hastaloeya and Nanasomi would often act intentionally dim around homonyms in order to deeply bother Henry Gordon, and while they did mistake his dissociative episodes as instances of his “steely resolve,” they were aware of the jests they made._

Needless to say, I found us an exit that took us deeper into the “River Styx” facility. Symbolism never being my forte, I realized late into the process that this was a vague form of symbolism that was more relevant on Earth than here. My Sun Stone felt a sort of longing at the idea, and I was made painfully aware of the fact that - before the Sundering - my fascination with Earth culture started with its music but slowly expanded to a generalized understanding of every facet of it. Azem, Fourteenth Seat of the Convocation, was far from a particularly creative person. But where he could not innovate, he _celebrated._ Things that stumped him were worn as prideful things, signs that he had either found something he felt no need to improve upon, or found something that needed no further improvements. _Perhaps,_ I considered, _that approach could be taken to my firstborn?_ I walked with this thought in mind, and it weighed on me heavier than any armor plating I’ve ever worn, forcing me into silence that no doubt looked heroic and pensive.

Before long, we found ourselves at a portal. It shimmered in the light of the Allagan facility, and after entering a form of airlock, we stood before it with slacked jaws. Through it, we saw a sea of stars. Lights, as shattered crystals reflecting a flash between them from time immemorial, floated past a fixed point that the portal was attached to. It looked to show us something, a road through a night sky so grand that we almost could not believe it.

“Wonders of Allag,” Nanasomi said, “Never would’ve thought.”

“Honestly,” I added, stunned into silence after uttering that word.

“We’re going there, right?” Hastaloeya asked before putting his axe away, “It looks… Peaceful.”

“Is it a bridge that leads to another facility?” Toragana asked.

“No,” Kumokiri pointed inside the portal, “We’re simply moving from one section to another, as we did during the fight. The facility is both in the Burn, and in the Aetherial Sea.”

My frustration came from the fact that she was right. My Sun Stone gave me flashes of amazement at the speed a brilliant pupil learned, and my Soul Crystal groaned. Fray, as silent as he had been until now, wanted nothing more than another skull to cleave into. I figured I would at least make him suffer a jaunt among stars before I let him loose again.


	5. The Lullaby of the Aetherial Sea

We stepped into the portal, and we found ourselves on a translucent road, with swirling motes of anima and aether that drew from us involuntary gasps: for starters, we thought we would float away into the stars and that the air would vacate our lungs. Well, I thought that, because I understood how space should have worked. Benefits of my Earth education, I suppose.

> _Funnily enough, in a drunken conversation the two of us had, he once told me that was a myth. I believe this case is something of an internal mixup, and if the scribe had known about this contradiction and asked, he likely would have corrected himself._

_“Apex Intelligence activated.”_ The facility spoke to us, even where we were, walking along this strange aetheric construct, and it had a lot to say much to my own chagrin, _“Are you enjoying yourself, Azem?”_

Kumokiri kept looking at me, as if I were to explain why the facility thought to call me Azem. I made a point to hush her, largely because I did not want to answer that question now but with a minor degree of curiosity. It called me out by name, or by a name I had used long ago.

_“It’s worth knowing the Calamity you will be causing today. Do not fool yourself, this is not some fruitless endeavor by a meager ‘Allagan scientist,’ this was a pinnacle achievement built by the great Emet-Selch himself. This is the answer to the greatest enemy of the Unsundered: ego-death.”_

As we walked, I felt the gravity of this sink in. It filled me, and I understood the reasoning such a grotesque monument to Hades had been built, why the Concept had been slaved to a single task as if it were an autonomous tool. It was to create compatible bodies for the Ascians to inhabit, endlessly. This was to be a fountain of youth, one that would exist outside of the Star’s influence and would enable a single Ascian consciousness to maintain its sanity through minimizing dysphoria as much as possible.

I had these thoughts, partially from the explanations, and partially from the Sun stone cluing me into the concepts Azem knew intimately where I did not. Things the Fourteenth would know that I had no chance in Hell of ever knowing leaked into my mind, hints from a consciousness far greater than my own. I considered it, for a moment, and realized that I existed purely for the sake that Azem did not wish to see me end. It was a gentle symbiosis, but not one I needed to combat in quite the way I needed to wrestle my darker tendencies in order to fully grasp the art of a Dark Knight.

_“Viable only through Charon’s Crossing. Was it not glorious? A Concept of a living being, tasked to one goal and one goal alone: the transfer of consciousness. It would ferry a mind from a corpse to a living body, even those who were lesser beings, like Allagans. It is from beyond their time, beyond their realm of thought, and never would have existed without the genius of Emet-Selch.”_

I listened to the facility speak, and I felt sorrow grip me. This time, it was my own. Such a powerful thing, the ability to live forever, to ensure that a legacy would persist beyond myself simply by _willing_ it, asking a strange being in a hole in the ground to press me into a cloned body. I felt a want to exist, so that I could never see it go. The temptation was strong, but as the facility continued to speak to me, I knew that I had to be the one that destroyed it.

_“I am hard-pressed to admit this to a former member of the Convocation, Azem, but you have pressured me into believing you are not fit to wield this gift. Such a thing could be used to propel us so much closer to restoring our people, but if it were given to people unworthy? Such as Allag, who used it for such petty things as transferring their blood to peasants as a gift of honor? Emperor Xande, who sought to do something as foolish as join the Void to the Source and bind the rage of Bahamut to his will without so much as a single concern of the potential for failure? Granted, Emet-Selch guided him to such a conclusion, but truly the fault is his. He still has the authority to burn this facility down with you inside it. I am guiding him through the process, now.”_

The squadron was silent, and we saw infinite possibilities around us. Each light drifted closer to us, and I believe each one of us saw memories. Not our memories, but memories all the same. Terrible things, some of them, but most were beautiful gems filled with hope. Newborn children, bonding ceremonies, first kisses, all of this floating around us in brilliant displays of aether. All of this, within our grasp to observe. Kumokiri was the first to reach her hand, and she wept brilliant tears that lifted from her face and created more memories. Copies of her memories, and I saw a beautiful life unfold. It was sad, but it had frequent flashes of a painting of a smiling Raen man, whose features softened with every glimpse of memory.

“This is my first nameday,” she laughed through tears, “Seen through the eyes of my late father,”

I urged her to walk with me, and I offered my hand to her shoulder. In the beauty of the moment, I felt the presence of another. I thought it was Hastaloeya at first, realizing he was steadfast in his forward march. I looked, and saw that it was a taller Raen man. He floated behind her, as if walking her along, his ethereal hand at her back. He wore a smile, before ruffling her hair with his hand and floating away. She looked about, finding the figure, and taking a moment to cry. I do not know what she said, but I know it was loving, and that she got a response.

We approached the next portal, and while the others were quick to leave this surreal space, a free floating realm of possibilities that shone upon itself in an endless, gentle sea of memories of the dead, I stood with Kumokiri for a time. She held onto the memory, of a young Raen girl looking in glee at the point-of-view for the memory at all manner of toys. It was love, pure and simple, immune to any horrors that may yet come. Something I could only hope I could impress upon a Soul Crystal to leave for my children, because as she let it go, she stood a little straighter, and clutched her staff a little tighter.

Ushering her forward, I looked behind me. I saw a familiar face in a collection of aether. It came to me, manifesting as a tall, hooded figure. It wore a red mask, and it walked to me as it shrinked its form to match mine. The form clasped my hand within its own, pressing a small device into my hand. I looked upon it, and I saw that it was a knife.

Not in the literal sense, of course not. It was a knife that would cut this thread from history. A small key, fashioned from a Soul Crystal plucked from the Sea itself. One that I instantly knew from my Sun stone was a replica of this facility’s access key created by Emet-Selch. The figure nodded, and turned from me. Tears filled my eyes, as I recognized the lazy slouch it wore. I heard the chimes of a voice, the weens and woons of a long-passed friend.

“Hero,” the figure said, with a tut-tut of its voice, “You never could leave well enough alone, could you?” There was a chuckle, “It seems to run in your family, adopted and otherwise. How very, very strange. Fear not, however, it would seem other things run there as well.”

The figure raised a hand high over its head, a snap filling the void of the Sea with light. Twelve other figures filled the space around us.

“Adoptive or not, we were a family. However, the older generations must make way for the younger,” I spoke, despite myself.

“Ah, there it was, ever the forward-thinker, Azem!” the voice chuckled, and the other shades made their own gestures of approval. There was a light-hearted nature to this, despite our grievances in the past, despite the things Emet-Selch had done, and despite the things that had grown in the ruins of his mistakes, we were above that. So far above it were we on that day, reader, that I no longer fear the end, “I decided only to watch, but for this, I had to break from that decision. My most grievous mistake was not razing this place and its blasted Apex Intelligence. You reminded me that I could move forward, in the First. Please, forgive me for not doing so in your absence, Azem.”

“Please, Emet-Selch, call me Henry,” I smirked, not in full control, “For no finer a being could I ever envision. Look at him! He has a family! Children! Oh, Emet-Selch,” My eyes filled with tears as my arms gestured at myself and at the forming collection of memories that left my face as I joyfully wept, and the figure simply tapped my nose in a playful gesture, to remind Azem not to lose focus.

“Henry Gordon, the chosen name of Azem, former Fourteenth Seat of the Convocation. It has a delightful ring to it, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” my face broke into a smile, “And so does all of the music he knows. Have you heard him sing? He is quite good at-”

Emet-Selch raised his hand, silencing Azem once more.

“In this space beyond spaces,” Emet-Selch spoke, “The Aetherial Sea, I have kept him long enough. When you are at duty’s end,”

“We will meet again,” I spoke, of my own volition, and I felt emotion behind the mask of Emet-Selch. For all the verifiable evil that he had done, for all the terrible things the Ascians created, in the Aetherial Sea, all is made clean. The negative emotions can be discarded, the foul things laid bare and atoned for, by simply moving forward with the currents, letting things come to pass as they would naturally. If my life teaches anyone anything, I wish it teaches this: one must always do just that. Almost as if he read this document long before I had written it, Emet-Selch turned, his own ‘forward’ being deeper into the Sea, away from the world he had done so much to, further into the memories of his friends and family, to be buried in the ideals they upheld.

“And, if you would be so kind, Henry Gordon,” he spoke, “Break that blasted Intelligence into as many pieces as you can, with that giant sword of yours. The bloody thing’s gone mad, and I never did like the sound of its voice.”

“But it kind of sounds like you,” I joked, wiping a tear from my eyes.

“An old me, an arrogant me. One that did not yet learn to be humble from the most humble of us all.” Emet-Selch’s arm flamboyantly waved about, dismissing the words of the Apex Intelligence as it spoke:

_“You face godlike judgment. May it extend eternally.”_


	6. CLASSIFIED EYES ONLY - Account of "River Styx" Incident, Hastaloeya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Henry Gordon’s account jumps straight into the action, I believe a first-hand account from one of his subordinates is in order. In particular, the account of Hastaloeya holds significance here. He was a simpler man, who had nary the breadth of experience that Henry Gordon held, but his unique approach to this scenario is one that I believe holds details that Henry lost in his ‘meeting’ with the Convocation.

After the walk, we were steeled in our resolve to see this through. Such a place of beauty was born from such a terribly grieving mind, a place of true and utter darkness. I walked along the translucent road, seeing the memories of my family and friends. But, of one particular set of memories, my curiosity seemed to guide. I looked to my superior, Henry Gordon, and could only watch in amazement as memories seemed to gravitate to him. It was not long before I realized that every step he made was a dinner bell to strange things, aetheric spirits and elementals seemed to swirl around him in a dizzying display. I had to look forward, but my eyes were always darting to him.

They walked with him, but I saw another being at his side. It was a dark thing, but not evil. At least, not inherently. I believe it was an anima of his rage, his fury, something unending within him. A cruel, dark thing whittled into a knife. I believe it was a spectre of himself. For every loving memory that swirled around Henry Gordon, a different color of memory walked in his shadow. As we shortened the gap between us and our exit, the shadow grew longer and longer. My pace quickened, but despite my eyes looking ahead of me I could see nothing beyond that foul thing.

I call it foul, but I did not hold malice to it. Often, he would summon a spectre much like this one to his side, and they would fight together. Terrified of what it may have been, I recognized it was something he often talked to in combat. They would swap jokes, it seemed, and now that I write this section of my report I believe I understand what it is.

As we all know, the Warrior of Light is very, very powerful. He also is reflected on all shards or some such, something about Sundered and Unsundered that he would rattle on about after drinks. I read in books that there was the Void, a world much like ours with the exception of having been consumed by the Dark. I believe this thing was his reflection there, a dark thing born of a dark place that had been sharpened into something sharper than any blade.

Here I go, sounding like Cecily again. Bugger all, it’s what I get for asking her to tutor me.

Point is, I think it’s as much a weapon in his hands as my axe is in mine. When someone thinks less of him, it runs the whetstone across its edge, when he earns the ire of a villain, this dark thing sets aside some of its power to use specifically for that villain.

And if you believe that one rumor floating about the taverns, the Primals are just a natural thing what happens in the land? Buildups of aether or some such? I believe that dark thing is the reaper’s scythe. A razor-sharp thing that is made specifically to cut down the unruliest things in a garden.

And here I go again talking like Cecily.

Cecily once showed me a game. It was a game of flowers, on a grid. It was an annoying game, because it had four simple rules and the only play you really made was the initial arrangement of flowers. Your initial placement would then be forced to obey the rules and you would start moving the flowers based on the rules. You had to keep changing the board to continue to adapt those new flowers. One couldn’t be open unless it were touching so many, but if too many touched one another you had to close one, and Cecily would often tell me I was playing it wrong and show me how to change the board based on the rules. Then I’d try it from scratch and could never keep to the rules. You wanted all the flowers open, or as many as possible! At least, that’s what I always default to. Cecily would laugh with that cheery laugh of hers, and we’d play cards instead.

She would always tell me, politely conversing as we played Triple Triad, that sometimes you needed to open a flower specifically for the rules of the game to close it, fill in a square specifically to empty it later so that more flowers could open in its absence.

I think Henry was part of the rules of some game, set aside to open flowers, and that dark thing would close them. I mean, how else would you explain him just showing up one day? Bloke just appeared one day and-

I’m rambling.

We walked along this space, and I saw memories of him doing just that. Of him being a gardener. I also recognized a memory of him, wearing bright and colorful armor as he wrangled that primal, Ifrit, out of a volcano and dragged it to the sea. He had lifted the magma from inside the volcano, and turned the explosion of aether that would have annihilated a small town into something to fight. Don’t know how I gained all that knowledge from seeing a shiny light in the Aetherial Sea, but there’s some things I think are better not to know. The easiest explanation of that whole ‘wrestling the lava inside a volcano’ bit, ties back to that flower game.

One flower threatened to open when it wasn’t supposed to.

And Henry, in a past life, closed it tightly in his fists.

I believe that dark spectre at his back is just that part of him set aside specifically for the closing of flowers, when he himself wants to open them.

I’m quite happy I don’t have to juggle anything that serious. If I’m supposed to get that promotion, don’t make me have to do what he does. I don’t think I could summon a dark thing like that.


	7. Styx Control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the reflective walk through the Aetherial Sea, Henry Gordon and his squadron confront Emperor Xande, and seek to turn everything into a full disarmament of the River Styx Facility. The madness of combat offers little time to comprehend much, though small moments are stolen from the combat to make terrible discoveries all the same.

As my squadron and I finally entered the Styx Control, we discovered that Emperor Xande had already been able to initiate whatever unfathomable protocol this strange “Apex Intelligence” wanted him to do. However, one thing he did not count on was the fact that I had no interest in dying that day, and I certainly was not going to let my flesh and blood die either.

As much as I hated the concept of dying, even with the knowledge that I had good things waiting for me when it finally happened, I was not about to let some twice-reborn failure of an Allagan dinosaur be the one that put me down. As Xande pulled levers and activated screens, I recognized he’d managed to string up Maralla and her compatriots in some strange contraptions. They were immeasurably large, and held a sickly glow to them. As lights pulsed down this facility, I recognized this was something akin to the mess that Thancred Waters had found Krile in. Based on sketches (and our subsequent looting of the Garlean facility), I understood precisely what was happening.

My daughter was tied to a capacitor, and it was trying to coax her aether out of her as if it were powering a battery. We had very little time to act, but one thing I recognized were several chutes and disposal bins. There were switches and screens in this elongated hallway that seemed to operate all manner of systems in this facility, some of which may have even been useful for us if Xande hadn’t begun clicking all the buttons and getting guidance from some blasted Accompaniment Node.

The overzealous toaster was silent, despite all the trouble it talked before. And frankly, I was keen to let it be silent. I gestured to the panels, and let my Sun stone begin to explain to me rough understandings of what these things were.

Azem’s memories were hard to decrypt, at times, but I’ll be damned if they did not have an uncanny ability to help me navigate Allagan (or otherwise Amaurotine-derivative) technologies and magicks. Explaining second-hand to my team, we decided that the easiest way was to engage Xande in diversionary tactics while I would move from console to console and use Emet-Selch’s access key to open what I could only imagine were aetheric pathways.

If I were to be fully understanding of the mechanical problems at work here, the “Damming Protocol” was supposed to jam up the figurative River of the facility, and then once a sufficient buildup was accrued, merge the parts of it that were in the Aetherial Sea to the Source. This merging would be on the level of Dalamud’s fall, as the cosmic forces at work would have forced a displacement of matter and aether at such a violent speed as to detonate the Burn in its entirety. If we could stop the process fast enough, we could outright prevent the facility’s rejoining of the Source entirely.

Failing that, however, we stood to lose an entire Star. Our goal was mitigation, here. If we could break open the aetheric pathways, we could prevent the buildup of excess aether in such a way that _might_ cause damage only in the immediate vicinity of the Styx Facility. That was our “good enough” guesstimate, after taking quick stock of how much aether was in play with my own Echo. It was a staggering amount of it, and it practically oozed, unaspected, through the seams of the facility and into our hands. It acted almost as the Burn did, but for a separate reason entirely. In the Burn, spending our aether caused more to come out than we anticipated. We could use less effort to get the same power of magic. Here, we could do more with that effort but if only because we were effectively lighting matches in a room filled with flammable fumes.

One errant cast of Verfire could take the whole facility down, so the precautions shifted to precise expenditures of the conjured aether, as well as a softening of how much we conjured in the first place. No doubt Emperor Xande would be in the same boat as us, or he would have simply killed us where we stood while we deliberated.

Though, as we set to begin this clash, Xande finally turned to us. The windows now at his back took on a sickening blur of motion for a moment, and we saw that it was aligning toward our Star.

 _“Aetherial Damming Protocol In Effect. You were warned, Azem,”_ that toaster spoke. Emperor Xande slammed his staff into the ground, spun it in his hands, and conjured a ball of lightning in his hand. It licked the facility’s surfaces, frying the Allagan technology and exploding several consoles. I heard screams from the contraptions that bound Maralla and her band, as their bodies began to fade from view. I slammed my zweihander into the ground, and took off with as much force in every stride as I could before I realized that Maralla was screaming not in pain, but in rage.

Not halting my pace, I plunged into action and cracked the contraption holding her in place before exerting my willpower outward and creating a barrier in front of me. I walled it up with some of my own Dark aether, creating a Blackest Night barricade on top of that afforded to me by my Echo. Xande snarled at me, before holding the orb up above me and performing the grisly task of consuming the aether of Maralla’s fellows.

If there is nothing more horrifying to me than death, it is the slow agonizing death of having one’s aether supped out of them like soup from a bowl. Xande was a dark, vile creature who deserved everything that was coming to him in his heyday. But this was far and above anything I expected he would do willingly. Had being brought from death affected him so?

Before I had long to contemplate it, I felt my daughter wrestle herself from my barriers and out into the open. I stepped with her, only realizing that my barricade was not enveloping her. In fact, she growled through gritted teeth and produced one of her own. Her eyes took on a glow I had only ever seen described to me, and she tore holes in reality to plunge her hands into.

Bards often sing of the time I tore Ifrit apart with my bare hands, or how the dreaded Nidhogg was slain by me conjuring a wraith of Bahamut to slap him down. These were only slight exaggerations. In fact, what I had done was bend the aether of a room to create scenarios where I was able to redirect the aether of a foe to hit the foe, rather than myself. With Ifrit, I used its surfeit of Fire-aspected aether to create arms that acted as copies of my own. I _did_ tear Ifrit in half that day in the Bowl of Embers, but with simulacra of its arms rather than my own.

I _did_ conjure _a dragon’s wraith_ to slap down Nidhogg, but it was _his._

My Echo, as I am sure has been studied by dozens of scholars and no doubt debated by forty times that amount of mages, allows me to read aetherial currents in a room. In combat, it is far more practical. In social spaces, it helps me intuit what a stranger means and whether or not I should trust them.

What I learned that day was that my Echo was hereditary.

_Maralla “Voidscale” Gordon took after myself, but in a very unique way._

Massive talons erupted from rifts. Their rippling, I was stunned, staggered, perhaps even paralyzed by the recognition that those arms were the arms of Hades himself.

> _It stands to reason that what Maralla performed here was a variant of Henry’s own unique aetheric talent: he could use the aether of beings around him to conjure fantastical things in staggering displays of power. However, where he would have stolen power from Xande, Maralla saw another, far more powerful entity that had managed to conceal itself to everyone else in the room. She coaxed the power of Emet-Selch out of the Aetherial Sea and into the complex. How she saw Emet-Selch in a space where her father did not, I cannot rightly say._

The massive, inhuman limbs that looked as giant’s clawed fists that comprised his upper arms grabbed at Xande’s staff and the spell that was consuming her compatriots. Maralla pulled her arms out of the rifts, and I watched as the arms tore away into the Aetherial Sea. Through the windows of the Allagan facility, I watched a lightning bolt fizzle out against the glass and a staff tumble endlessly into the black.

“Maralla!” I shouted, dispelling my barrier with a pulse of force that staggered Xande, “Are you good?!”

“Good, my dad asks!” She snarled before drawing her rapier, “I just saved three lives with one spell!” She threw her hands to her compatriots, having managed to be freed from their binds by the disruption of Xande’s magicks, “Get your sorry asses behind the adventurers! We’ll fix this or die in the attempt! You lot wanted so badly to court me, _watch the standards I have in action!”_

My blade swinging out of the machinery and into the air, I took a ready stance as Xande stood from his stupor. He roared in some ancient Allagan tongue, barking about how only those who lived had the right to exist, and how we would not mourn the unborn so what point did we have to mourn the dead. Some inane drivel drawn from the Dark aether that likely filled his being. Having dealt with this long ago, the whole Light against Dark dichotomy, I called him a blunt and moved on with it.

“Strong talk for a clone of a clone, isn’t it?” I shouted, hoping he choked on the irony.

“And someone I didn’t know existed, much less was born at all, before today!” Maralla howled, her voice hitting a note of rage I had not anticipated her being able to possess.

“You do not know I existed?” This gave Xande pause, and he began to pulse with a dark energy. “Surely, you can’t be serious! Whelp, you know of the Crystal Tower? Of the Calamity caused by my indomitable will?!”

“Oh, that big fuckup was you!?” She shouted, “Before or after my father kicked your ass?!” I had a shocking revelation then. She and I were bullying a long-dead Allagan Emperor who had the power to detonate half a continent because he was scared of death.

“Insolent! You will bow before your-” He began, conjuring a spell of some sort or another, but before I rattle on about the spell, I’ll tell you bluntly: he never finished it.

“I bow before nothing,” She roared, tossing her sword into the air with a flourish I had only previously seen in X’ruhn Tia, _“And my name isn’t Shirley!”_

She had used that phrase to finish off a spell, and it was a spectacular detonation of aether. As I recognized the spell, I realized she was using a precise amount of aether for the spell, and was using the flow of aether from the Sea to further fuel her spells, as opposed to reacting to it. Where I was forced to play cautious, she was not.

“Maralla, careful! The ebb of the Sea can-”

“Can it,” She barked, using a phrase I taught her, “You can see the flow just as well as I can, can’t you? It’s only oozing in through particular locations,”

“What sorcery are you speaking of?!” Xande howled as he pounded his chest and started hurling energy blasts at us, “One does not _see_ aether!”

“Maralla, we’ll talk about this later! Help me! Hastaloeya! To the front!”

“Aye, sir!” Hastaloeya cheered, lobbing a grappling hook at Xande and tugging it in such a way to fly at the giant Allagan like a fastball. The two engaged in a trading of blows, Hastaloeya utilizing his locking onto the Emperor’s form with the chain with timed tugs and leaps, making a show of dodging the abomination’s swings, “He’s all mine!”

Maralla and I disengaged, finding Xande was distracted well enough to get to the consoles and start navigating through them, looking for the blasted port to insert Emet-Selch’s key. She would stop, every so often, grab at her head, snarl at the disruption, and slam another button in some strange attempt to guide her search.

“These stupid visions,” She hissed, “I keep _getting them!_ What a pain in my ass!”

“That’s the Echo, Maralla,” I chided, “When did they start?”

“Since I was four,” She squinted at me, “Thought it was normal until I started havin’ em while I was awake.”

“Fuck,” I said with a ragged sigh, “You’ve had it that long?”

“Why else did you think I knew what words I wasn’t supposed to learn?”

“You cheeky kid,” I laughed, “No wonder. You know how much trouble you caused me?”

“Yea,” She laughed, “Won’t matter too much, though, if I can’t find the bloody key for this slot,” She shook her head, growling at me as I tossed her the key in question. Expertly, she placed it in its place and twisted it. The facility started to sound sirens off, and we watched aetheric pathways pop open as globules of aether formed.

In a moment, we became captains of separate teams, Maralla and I. Through the ensuing chaos, we organized our men to take the globules and disperse them into bins that were, from what we could gather, chutes that lead to the Sea. The globules would disperse harmlessly, and when Nanasomi loudly complained at how frustrating it was to get these things into the bins, Maralla gave him the most intense correction I think she could have given him.

“I think you’d rather be a little annoyed at how hard it is to handle solidified, unaspected aether clusters with your short tooth-pick legs, instead of having one get split down the middle and destroy the bloody Star, wouldn’t you!?”

Nanasomi looked to me for a moment then double-timed his efforts without a further complaint.

While the rotations were progressing, I found a lone report condensed into a script. Curious, and having moments to spare, I tapped on it. What assailed my eyes was a blueprint of a human being. A single person, with a _familiar face._ I saw the red hair, and the Miqo’te frame, and I knew at once.

“Who is that?” Maralla asked, stopping her search momentarily, “Is that-”

“It says on these reports that it is. This is a template, designed by a user by the name of Salina-23, and-”

I was stunned. The report, as my Sun Stone helped me translate, was an explicit proof of concept. To the Allagans, he was a failsafe, built possibly to wander the Star, die, and be reborn as a child here before a Node would send him out to find his way into a loving family. The story went on further: detailed accounts of every instance that passed with a state of “UNSUCCESSFUL” plastered on the report. The most recent instance had a status code of “LOST IN ACTION, CONSIDERED DEAD; SECURE SPECIMEN AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.”

_When my friend reads this account, he will know who he is._

Maralla saw the look in my eyes, and said nothing as I took a tomestone, slotted it into the console, and downloaded the file. Such information was not only highly valuable to me, but I knew it would be more valuable to my friend.

Several rotations of dumping aether into the chutes later, we felt Styx Control get unbearably warm. Lookout outside, I recognized that the facility was very quickly falling from the Aetherial Sea and into the Source. We had to have seemed like a meteor to whatever was below us.

“Maralla!” I shouted over the roar of combat, “We might have a problem!”

“Yea I know. One of the panels I saw him fighting with revealed a shelter. It was never tested, but it was designed to withstand such an event as this one. If we can get a panel open, we’ll be able to sprint downstairs from this facility and get safe!”

“What of the aetheric displacement of this facility entering the Source?!”

“We’ve dispersed enough aether at this point that it’ll be a slight explosion in comparison.”

“How slight, Maralla?!” I was asking her these questions despite the fact that I was likely the most qualified in the entire room to declare this, but her more adept eye for the flows of aether likely gave her more credibility in this discussion than I had.

“Well it won’t be Dalamud, at least! And if we get into the panic room and die, it won’t be our problem anymore!”

“That is not assuring!”

“Sorry, I didn’t pick up your bedside manner on account of you saving the world too much to be a proper father figure!” She laughed in my face, a grin shockingly similar to Sadu’s on her face. Before you ask, yes, she did mean that as a joke. We had an odd relationship for outsiders, so fear not the banter. Love was there.

Needless to say, I eventually found the access panel in question and tripped the escape protocol as the glass showed us a blinding combination of so many colors as to be a swirling rainbow splattered on our eyes.

“Everyone, downstairs, now!” I shouted, and before Xande could catch on, Maralla conjured a Scorch spell that incorporated a single-finger gesture as its somatic component. Have I mentioned yet, in this dictation, how much I love my children?

We sprinted down the narrow corridors, Hastaloeya having scooped Kukomi and Nanasomi on his shoulders while Toragana expertly leaped ahead of us, a cape twirling behind her. Maralla’s compatriots limped ahead of myself and her, with their speed being maintained by her continuous string of insults. Eventually, I made the mistake of turning my head behind me despite my full sprint.

Walking, slowly and with angry determination, was Xande. He stomped ahead, and I realized I heard the Apex Intelligence began blathering again.

 _“Aetherial Damming Protocol: Disengaged.”_ There was a brief silence, as I resumed my sprint, _“Source Collision remains imminent. Clever little rats. I will not forget what you have done here today. Upon impact, the River Styx Facility will be open to all who would seek it. The collision will leave no doubt to its whereabouts. Worthy, unworthy, Allagan, Ascian, lesser being... if undefended, anyone who dares take it could happily cause a Calamity on demand. Azem, I hope you are proud of yourself.”_

As the panic room sealed behind us, we huddled together as one. There was a sound, at first deafening, and while my memoir here proves that at the very least I survived, in the moment we were only able to pray that we would survive.

Before the white-hot rush of aether swept over us and our bodies slammed against the interior of the panic room, we all watched in horror as Xande simply stood outside the translucent doors, a sickly smile on his face as a large, egg-shaped Allagan Node spun its pieces and began to scan him.

It became unbearably hot, then blinded us, and then we all felt a single impact as our little panic room whiplashed into existence, displacing aether that quickly rushed back into the voids left within the facility and choking us just enough to cause unconsciousness.


	8. Sand in the Bottom of the Ourglass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the dust settles, Henry Gordon and his compatriots find themselves staggered by the impact of the River Styx Facility's impact. Barely in fighting shape, the heroes are ragged and shaken, but they have one final test of their abilities needed. One final proof of power, that the River Styx Facility is no longer more than the legacy of those long-dead.

We were hardly given time to recover from what must have been the smallest scaled recreation of Dalamud’s Fall I’ve ever seen, and I’ve actually been to the site Dalamud fell, as well as the Bozjan Southern Front back when that was still a contested warzone. Its proper name eludes me, to this day, but no matter.

We were in the destroyed ruins of an escape-pod struggling to find ourselves (thankfully we were all in one piece beyond minor head traumas), when we found ourselves in what I initially thought was ash. I quickly grabbed a handful, and found it was _soil_. Not the aether-less sand of the Burn, proper, but _soil_. My time as a Botanist (of which I still pursue, albeit on a much less grand a scale) told me that I was looking at the kind of soil produced only by potent Earth-aspected aether. Lifting my eyes, I saw evidence of all the elements. We had exploded ourselves into an oasis, it seemed.

“Sir,” Hastaloeya whispered to me, and my approach saw him holding a formation of crystals. I swept my eyes over them, and they were water crystals. What I beheld was a creation of pure aetheric discharge: the River Styx Facility’s impact with the Burn had created a sort of pull from the Aetherial Sea. As you no doubt have concluded by now, the Aetherial Sea living up to its name means even a cursory contact with it would splash that vital life-energy into a place deprived of it. Yes, like a sponge the Burn took the aether. And as we stepped in this newly born oasis, we pushed out the sweet nectar it held from its now soft, porous surface.

“It’s… Beautiful,” whispered Kumokiri, “The balance of aether here is slowly recovering. Why?”

Maralla, strangely enough, was the one who spoke first. And where I expected the musings of Sadu’s daughter, I instead heard a shockingly spiritual response.

“We have connected this place to its home,” She started, her shoulders drooped and her back straight. She walked forward, staggered, before dropping to her knees and dragging her palms along _mud_ , “The Aetherial Sea was the salve for the world-wound that is the Burn.”

Truer words she could not have spoken. As my colleagues in the Scions of the Seventh Dawn would later write in all the classified documentation, the Burn was treated with precisely the right salve. Theories abound in those reports, with my particular favorite proposition being made by Alisaie Leveilleur: “It is of my earnest opinion that we should recreate this event anywhere in the Burn that the aetheric balance does not return within the coming years, with special precautions made to observe from a safe distance.”

To this day she still doesn’t let me live down the fact that I nearly blew up half a continent in some grandiose adventure, and she wasn’t there to at least watch the proverbial mushroom cloud. That’s what I get for creating a _literal_ mushroom-cloud with an overloaded spell as a warning that I had entered the field during a Nadaam, one where Alisaie was present to participate in the event.

She asked me how long I’d been able to do that. With an unceremonious shrug and a roll of my head, I announced something along the lines of “Since, well, _ever,_ ” and she punched me in the mouth.

_In fact, Alisaie highlights this in her own memoirs as another moment “the Warrior of Light managed to employ some strange form of roguish charm that demonstrated why so many admired him. Simply because I knew the expected reaction was to fawn over him, or otherwise be impressed, I broke the mold by simply socking him in the face.”_

As we stood, admiring the formed oasis around us, we recognized a waterfall. It poured into something of a lake, and in the center of this lake was a mass of debris that I can only imagine used to be a facility. Maralla stood, fists full of soil, and shook her hands open and clean before drawing her rapier and holding its tip toward the ground.

“He is alive,” she spoke softly, “Xande. His aether is far more powerful than it was before, can you feel it?”

Naturally, I didn’t, but with a thought I allowed my Echo to show me the pathways of aether. I recognized the conduits poured aether out, unaspected and venting in random configurations, and that some of it was being funneled into the debris. I nodded, sternly, and drew my own weapon.

“I don’t feel it, but I _see_ it,” I said to the startled surprise of my squadron. They had known I was tuned into things like this, but they had no idea I could _see_ aether. It wasn’t a trick I did often in their presence, much less talked about. I was once told by Master Matoya, Y’Shtola Rhul’s teacher, that such an art would have burned my aether out if it weren’t for my Echo enabling it. Something about how an Echo could be used in the absence of aether, or some such. I still don’t know how the damn thing works, just that I can blink my eyes a little harder and see the flowing currents with terrifying clarity, almost as if it’s an overlay of my vision. And overlaid that pile of destroyed facility was a mass of Dark-aspected aether, and a far more powerful mass attached to it. The aether seemed to froth for a moment, and the debris was suddenly launched about the oasis. Standing in the settled ruin, was a grotesque union of Emperor Xande and an Allagan construct, likely a Node with every bit of scattered technology it could get its grubby mits on.

“Maralla!” I shouted, “The conduits!”

“I feel them,” She said, “I can channel them if you direct them to me,”

“Are you certain!? That’s an insane amount of aether just freely flowing!”

“You seemed to do well enough with Ifrit’s, back in the day!” She shouted, “You think I just instinctively did that? Ha! I had a ‘hunch.’ And then I broke his magic once!”

Stunned into silence, I drew my massive blade and began a sprint.

“Sir!” the others shouted after me, only to be cut off by swarms of automata.

“Defend Maralla, she’s going to cast a massive spell, and needs the help! I am more than capable of doing what I need unattended!”

What followed was a blur. I stepped through the muck of a primordial waterbed, boots sinking into ever-increasingly soft muck as I would find a conduit, engage some particularly nasty beast from the Burn trying to gorge itself on the conduits, and then turn myself into a conduit with which I could aspect and then funnel the aether to my daughter. There were six conduits in all, and while I stomped and slashed and killed, I had a moment to fall back and let Fray handle things while I reflected.

Whenever my daughter was in view, I found myself awash with the idea of leaving behind something. A legacy of sorts having been a minor reason I kept up with the adventuring business, years after the Star had been saved well enough for me to stop worrying about bloody Ascians and all their ilk. I knew a song back home, about wanting to sell out a funeral, and that was a goal of mine. A consequence of that is leaving behind enough of myself to where people would come to my funeral. Lives touched, people changed, hearts warmed.

My brief jaunt into the Aetherial Sea made me realize something important: nothing ever truly ends. Each person I encountered, every deed done, I would create a ripple in a sea. This ripple would be felt by hundreds if not thousands of people in twice as many ways, and I would never fully know the full extent of things I had changed. Lives that were better for my existence.

However, I could take heart in knowing that, despite the flaws I saw in myself, I had people who were clearly and quantifiably improved under my supervision. And even one that wasn’t under my supervision, but who knew of me. I had created a whole other person, and I could see her before me.

My children born of wedlock were not there, but I also considered them. They were coming of age, and were quickly accepted into the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. They did not have the bindings of fate that Maralla had, but they were still powerful adventurers all their own. While I wished they would not take up the whole ‘saving the world’ profession, it dawned on me that such was just the legacy I left behind.

Heroes, new and old, always moving forward. Never leaving well enough alone.

My reflections were halted at the sixth conduit, by Xande-Reconstructed. The massive abomination with an Allagan Companion Node in its chest roared in my face, and I realized that Xande had become a bestial thing when I recognized that his brain had been completely supplanted by cables and plates typical of Allagan machinery.

 _“It would be you,”_ the Apex Intelligence spoke from Xande’s mouth, and I watched as the man so terrified of death was only able to make grotesque faces of horror at the fact that he had not died, but he was no longer what I would comfortably call living. The synthetic voice rattled on, _“Azem, the Weary Wanderer! I was able to read your deeds through Xande’s simple mind. How you sieged the Crystal Tower, and removed him from his seat. And how you then cleansed the place of the Void, a glaring light in the dark!”_

“Dues to my fan-club are due on the first and fifteenth of the month,” I snarked, “And you just agreed to pay his debts!”

_“Jest all you will, but you will die this day! I will have your aether, and the aether of your daughter! Your subordinates! I will drink deep, and restore the River Styx Facility with the essences I draw!”_

“Sorry to disappoint but my essence tends to induce vomiting,” I said before hefting my sword, “That bloody Cerberus could tell you more, if it’s still alive in the Void I’m sending you to!”

_“Do you not see? I am the Apex Intelligence. I am a being built from the desires of the Allagan people to achieve true enlightenment! They connected me to the Aetherial Sea, and I supped its wealth for centuries. I am far more than some simple machine! I am a god!”_

The coin had finally dropped. This was a bloody Primal. It had subsumed Emperor Xande as part of a directive to protect this facility. Much like the Concept of Hades that hopefully now was destroyed somewhere in the ruins of this hellish incident, the Apex Intelligence was a Concept created with one specific task.

“Well, what’s a god to some punk kid from Jersey!?” I shouted, hefting my sword over my head and leaping into the air. I was still a conduit for aether at this juncture, and while my body could not hold it for terribly long, I take a little off the top and blast Xande’s walking corpse with it in an attempt to stun this Primal. As my blade came down, I connected a proverbial circuit. A surge of aether blasted Xande’s form, and it staggered backward, conduits explosively disconnecting from his skull. The walking corpse thrashed, and wailed, but would not obstruct my locking of the final conduit to Maralla. Sheathing my sword, I stuck one hand into the conduit and gestured the other to my daughter.

This process is one that I’m sure more scholarly sorts can explain, but to put it simply I was making myself something of an elbow-pipe for which the flowing, near-liquid aether could congeal and roll down. However, due to the interference of the Apex Intelligence, this had become something more complicated, and so I adapted with heart at no small risk to myself. If I did not disperse a congealing ball of energy that filled my entirety to bursting, I could risk dying a hideous death. But, having done this once before on the First with Light-aspected Aether, I found this was a far less painful experience.

> _Previous estimates are that most beings on the Star would be spent alongside the funneled aether, which speaks far better of Henry Gordon’s sheer constitution than any display of prowess ever could. And yet, he fails to understand just how close he came to dying._

Stomping my feet through the mud, I held the end of the energy and dragged a ball of it to Maralla’s place. Beasts were all around, and despite their best efforts to run me through with whatever they could find, all I needed to do was vent a little of the pressure outward. Pulses of energy dissipated these beings, giving them far more aether than they’d ever need and making them vaporize in one of six ways, based on whatever aether imbalance was most prominent in them as they perished.

Made a pretty light show.

Staggering to my knees, I saw Hastaloeya walk toward me to offer assistance before Toragana and myself both shouted in unison that he risked meeting the same fate as these ugly beasts if he touched me. He set his jaw, and swung his axe over my head to call the beasts out of my way. As they jumped onto him, he roared with defiant laughter and held them at bay. I stood up slowly, each step blurring my vision with immeasurable pain before finally I was able to hand the congealed aetheric ‘ball’ to her. She dispersed it into a field around her, and levitated off the ground.

“Father!” She shouted, gritting her teeth, “I can’t-”

She didn’t need to finish the sentence. I grabbed her hand, and floated up with her. As we both shared the burden of the aetheric buildup, we were lifted several fulms from the ground and it was quickly apparent that the Aetherial Sea was ready to be dumped into the Apex Intelligence once and for all. All six forms of aether swirled around us in a dizzying display of lights and colors, the kind that makes me nauseous just thinking about to this day, and we felt an unimaginable power at both our fingertips.

Sharing a vast reserve of aether like that tends to put your mind into the other person’s, and vice-versa, in a sort of mental handshake. Perhaps one of the soul? Hard to fully tell, but we thrust our free hands forward, and a surge of energy left our palms and became a detonation of all six types of aether, swirling about with bolts of energy licking the surface of every object between us and Xande. Behind us were my cohorts, and slightly to our left was Hastaloeya.

However, as powerful as I felt, I felt as if I was going to pass into the energy I was directing, as if my being was going to be sent forward in some sort of plume. I felt one hand on my shoulder, and then another. And another. I felt thirteen hands grabbing at my back, holding me in place, but dangerously close to letting me go.

“Oh no you don’t,” I heard Maralla shout, “You’re not leaving me alone with mother!”

My vision swam as I was shot out of the aetheric discharge and into the dirt behind Maralla, who was surging with energy and tracing symbols in the air with her hands while doing something of an elaborate dance. She coalesced the energy into a sphere in her right hand, cupped the bottom of it with her left and held it behind her for only a moment before flinging the vortex into the surging Apex Intelligence.

_“What are you doing!? That much aether should have killed you! No! No! Impossible, impossible, imp-”_

A swirling purple sphere slammed into the form of Xande-Reconstructed, and he fell backward before rolling onto his stomach, crawling away a few steps, and solidifying into crystals with a terrified scream. He slowly became a glowing monument of the aetheric energies used to kill him, before finally dissipating into a slow, fading flurry of lights.

Maralla fell to the ground, panting, laughing, and standing up before throwing an arm up, roaring in defiant happiness, only to fall in my arms the moment I was within a fulm of her.


	9. The Document Speaks For Itself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Presented with no further commentary from myself, this part of the document will hold the final key you are looking for, old friend. I pray that you read this in its entirety, before moving forward with whatever plans you may have, as it is something of a heartfelt message from Henry Gordon to you.
> 
> Twelve keep you.
> 
> \- Lynell Martin, Immortal Flames Ambassador and former Ishgardian Inquisitor

Despite my concerns initially, we were able to make our way out. Maralla made a speedy recovery, and was angry at her compatriots for being so patently useless as to be hiding in debris while we dealt with Xande and his Reconstructed form, as well as slaying a primal. She had quite a tirade on my back, being unable to walk on her own but refusing to let Hastaloeya carry her. They then tried to put the moves on Toragana or Kumokiri, who both resoundingly rejected them with similar declarations.

They then looked at me, as if I’d say something to defend them.

“Well,” I chuckled, “In their defense they don’t have the luxury of knowing _me,_ so this is all new to them. Can’t fault them for being terrified!”

This lightened the mood considerably, and we returned to the Steppe without incident and explained all of this to Sadu. A few calls on the Linkpearl later, and I was able to palm off the handling of this issue to my direct colleagues in the Scions, who wished to bring my children along with them. But, I must now address the intended recipient of this particular memoir, or whoever ends up reading this.

Some things, buried deep within Allagan history, are meant to be left alone.

If you wish to know what I found, the information discovered, I will provide a synopsis for you in this document, as well as leave the tomestone to you. My friend, it is the very one I entrust to you in my will. The code to access it is a four-digit code, keyed to my nameday.

We shared many drinks on the day I returned, and you likely suspected something was up. After all, I do not lightly talk about legacies. You, however, are something of a legacy all your own. Stitched in with my legacy is yours, and it is a great one.

So what if you were an engineered product of some Allagan that claimed she was a princess in order to deceive you and her contemporaries? You are still the owner of every deed you committed at my side. You hold within you the key to all manner of things, and I do not just mean the Allagan ruins of the River Styx Facility. You’ll find the information in my tomestone and more within the facility, but I trust that you will have already suspected what is there.

Please, my friend, I wish you to know that we are men out of time. We have transcended the fates we were assigned, and grown so much more than that. You always looked to me as an inspiration, but I want you to know that from the moment I found the records that proved you are one of many, many beings that sought to find themselves a life in this world, I was shocked. Amazed even, that your tenacity transcended lifetimes even before you were given the supernatural ability to travel to the First and save our world.

As grand as the revelation was, it was also one that fills me with sorrow.

You are one of the many ripples I have left in this world. And when you find yourself in the River Styx Facility, you will find a mirror. Without the Apex Intelligence involved to interfere, you will have the ability to adjust any manner of settings to your liking. One of those settings will be your own mortality. You will have the ability to decide, once and for all, if this second chance you have been given is to be your last.

Strangely enough, I also found the facility had coded me a clone. That damnable Concept of Hades, buried deep in the now-fertile oasis of the Burn, was capable of crafting me, of all people, another chance possibly out of some eldritch equivalent to a muscle spasm. It was a dark, terrible beauty that would nullify all meaning we have in these lives of ours. Perhaps that is why the facility was abandoned? Despite its power, being able to transcend death would deprive us mortal things of all reason to move forward. We could progress to where _we_ lived forever. That eternal cascade of ripples would be rebounding endlessly on itself, in a lake rather than a coursing river. Use of such a facility would lead to precisely that stagnation of everything taking one shape. Would that not be something akin to the stasis of the First? That great Light-aspected nightmare? Using something so dark to wrap around to hit ourselves in the back of the head, using the Aspect dedicated to Change to lock everything in place.

Before I get metaphysical and terrify my scribe any further, please my friend, I beg you to consider the implications before you make a decision.

You are no doubt reading this after I have passed. I included the tale of the Aetherial Sea here to tell you that you will never truly lose me, even with my death in mind. Of the two of us, you are the younger (physically, anyway). If my understanding of Miqo’te lifespans are any good at all, you will be joining me before too much longer, unless I went and died doing something heroic instead of sleeping peacefully in my home. If my idiotic self went and died being a big gods-damned hero at this age? Bah, you’ll outlive me by decades.

Either way, I hope that our time together has taught you to value this life we live for the simplicity of it. The times spent hungover, getting into bar fights, repelling monster stampedes, and saving the world, all of it is that much sweeter because it has to end. If I wake after my death to see your eager face, I will happily rejoin you in whatever you need me for.

That tomestone will give you the ability to erase any traces of me from that facility. The record of my body - and the Concept’s ability to pull me from beyond the grave - will be gone as if I never were there. It will also give you that same ability, dear friend.

G’raha Tia, the man who called me his inspiration, the one who soon became mine. You are my perfect paradox: a circular chain of events that should not have existed but did anyway. The things we’ve done, the worlds we saved, and the lives we changed, they will stand resolute without us being there. My children, Hell, even yours, are better for our time in this place.

The joy you have known, the pain you have felt, the prayers you have whispered and answered - they shall ever be your strength and your comfort. You said those to me, once. If my funeral was standing-room only, let that be proof enough that we left our mark.

Let us leave our legacy behind us, and sleep forever in the deep Aetherial Sea.


End file.
